All About Me, All About You, All About Anything

One of my favourite projects from the Apple Teacher Learning Centre is the All About Me project where students create a custom portrait using Keynote shapes to show their interests, hobbies, family, favourite sports and more.

Over the years it is a project which we have returned to in many different ways as I’ll explain later.

The project comes with a great Keynote template with a number of pre-made silhouette heads. However, the children in my school represent a diverse population with 41 languages spoken. As you can image, we needed a wider range of silhouettes for the project.

So using the camera and Keynote we adapted the All About Me iPad workflow.

• Open Keynote and create a new presentation or utilise the All About Me Keynote deck.
• Click + and Camera and take a selfie (side on) or work with a partner to take your image.
• Click + and select Drawing. Use the tools to create your black silhouette (or another colour).
• Tap the original photo and delete it.
• Click + and add in shapes that represent your passions, interests and hobbies.

Hopefully you’ll get a great image from every student which you can display in your classroom and really showcase their interests. You can find out more about the project, and we how it has evolved, in the Apple Education Community here.

The opportunities for using this project are great across the curriculum. We’ve used it to analyse characters from books with words in the silhouette rather than images. This is a great way to show how we can get inside the head of a character.

We’ve also created displays all about our heroes such as Mo Farah.

Indeed the options are endless and with a focus on wellbeing, across education globally, it is also a really effective way for pupils to share the worries inside their minds and open up a way to discuss issues which are affecting large numbers of pupils in your class or school.

We’ve even begun creating whole school pieces of art inspired by the original all about me.

If you have used the project, or adapted it for a different purpose, I’d love to see your ideas below. Your idea could inspire teachers at our school and beyond.